Herbert Simon- American political scientist, economist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—if you don’t know who he is, I had to Wikipedia it too. I was trying to find a quote that exemplified how I felt about PPC ad testing. That’s not easy….
Like an experiment, sometimes, they don’t work out so good. But sometimes, they really really do. So let’s find out what we can get away with and jump right in and start with AdCenter.
So on a Bing SERP, there’s a lot going on, so how do you stand out with your NEW product? What else does MSN have to offer?
I know what you’re thinking, “Sure, they let you put it through in the save ad process. But do they actually show the ads? Do people click on them?”
They sure do! These stats were pulled over a 5 day period, pay no attention to the no conversions, I’m not using conversion tracking in this account through AdCenter, but I can tell you that the FREE ad is now beating the other two ads that are playing nicer with the editorial guidelines.
Remember how in AdCenter you can do all caps words in headlines and all caps triple threats in body copy? Yes, I purposely may have sort of been fooling around with the AdCenter capitalization formats and then totally working while on Facebook when I found one of our MSN ads. Run a few publisher performance reports and sure enough, facebook.com. Average CPC? 0.40cents.
Go ahead and eliminate right away MSN money, real estate, auto, astrology and sections. In fact I have a list for you…
Some of these you might want to appear on, but it’s doubtful all campaign on all properties. MSN has a LOT of properties.
More and more, marketers are trying to find ways to monetize FB ads, or at least, put a dollar value on this social media. I don’t have the secret sauce for that, but I can tell you that you are not supposed to put things all in caps.
To be fair, the person setting this ad up could have received “Please note” warning that states that the ad does not meet capitalization guidelines and could be rejected and ignored it. Which means that you could do it too. But the fact still remains, the ad ran. I saw it. Several times.
Of course, if you drop the “www” Yahoo won’t let you. Google has been cracking down a little lately with the all caps KEYWORD version, but still try it anyway.
One of my newest favorite features. 35 characters can be a lot of space, so how do you capitalize on that? Let’s try some examples
So for a branded campaign that encompasses your entire site of books, movies and music you might want to have some fun. Of course, the longer you make them, the fewer you might want to use, 10’s a lot if you’ve got 5 word or more links to add.
For an extra push of the limits- see what you can get away with using trademarks and brand names if you’re a re-seller.
And of course it wouldn’t be any presentation of mine if I didn’t try and take it one step too far. I recommend the style of capitalization on word rather than writing the links out like sentences, like you would try in a regular PPC ad. Changing gears a little-
Completely worth a try- does require a snippet of code on the pages that are a part of the campaign/remarketing list and does take a few days to gather enough data to build your “defined” audiences.
Very briefly- there are several great tutorials out there now (possibly including the one I wrote on the Portent blog) that can help walk you through this. In your AdWords account, click on the Audiences tab and create the remarketing lists first, add the code to the relevant pages, then create the custom combinations. Brad Geddes has a great one that went out very recently in great detail.
Combine those lists to include and exclude as you need and now…
I’ve been taking screenshots of a client’s ads that have been stalking me throughout my day- it’s pretty interesting and compelling. Sites have ranged from grocery stores and crafting sites to athletic supporters to whiskey. They sell pillows. You can be constructive with a specific coupon code, creepy or even a little threatening. Launching a remarketing campaign the same day as a big sale is a great way to reach customers at the beginning and end of the sale.
This isn’t a new tool, but it’s certainly one that’s receiving love and attention from Google.
I created this completely and totally awesome image with my minimal Photoshop skills. Now how do I make this into an equally awesome ad?
Template name: Elegant #4, complete with Flash and 6 different sizes to destroy your enemies with.
So while testing those new ad formats or sets of ads, you might need some inspiration to get those creative juices flowing…and no, it’s not really that different, I just wanted to put the foot in.
Reach that sporty audience or the audience that likes to think they’re sporty and aren’t. Particularly useful for dating sites. If talking jock isn’t your thing, perhaps movies are…
The list goes on, movie quotes give that great sense of familiarity and out of context can really get a person’s attention- they know it, but they don’t know why. Except maybe the Kneel before Zod. People love to see familiar things. Even better if you can match a stereotype of the movie to your product or service. But what do you do when you want to instill a sense of urgency in your ads?
Nothing gets people going like yelling “hurry” “4,3,2…1” or “fire” so why not be subtle with your ads in the same way? Implying that the world is ending is my favorite way to instill a sense of speed. Now that they’re wound up, bring them down with…
You want to be sad, but not too sad, after all they can’t buy from you while sobbing on the floor in a heap. These may not be great for a typical ecommerce client, but I bet you can find one sad ad somewhere that needs optimization. And last, but not least, I have some examples of ads just for the men in your life, since I did a slide on Writing for Women last year, it’s only fair.
It’s not a hair club or even the beautiful mens club (thank you Jimmy Kimmel), but it gets the point across. I even included some bad grammar to help on the Git R’ Done ad.
That does it for me on ad testing, when you’re doing your ad set optimization, sneak one of these alongside and see how it compares.